ALONIA, Greece — The feisty owner of a small family business that makes detergents has never had time for anticapitalist firebrands. So he was suspicious and skeptical when he was approached by left-leaning activists campaigning to purge “profiteers” from the market.

But, struggling to keep his busi-ness afloat under the weight of un-paid invoices and constant demands for bribes, the owner, Savvas Mav-romatis, decided to give their pro-posal a shot. He started selling his products directly to consumers for cash at fixed prices through a non-profit collective, instead of to shops and traders as he had always done.

Fourteen months later, Mr. Mav-romatis, 46, credits the group with saving his enterprise from a n eco-nomic meltdown that rivals the Great Depression.“

We are in the middle of a terrible crisis and are just looking for solu-tions,” said Elias Tsolakidis, the driving force behind the so-called no-middlemen movement here in northern Greece, a small, quixotic but surprisingly successful effort to redefine the terms of commerce.

“We don’t have a magic wand. We are not communists and we are not capitalists, but we are trying to help people survive.”

In their search for solutions, Greeks are tinkering with a new kind of economy with little prece-dent in modern Europe.

Experimental ventures like the one Mr. Mavromatis joined have sprung up on the margins in towns and cities across Greece, a bottom-up effort to address the economic crisis .

Mr. Tsolakidis organizes the ranks of the no-middlemen movement in his region through a nonprofit col-lective, the Voluntary Action Group of Pieria. The movement seeks to cut out wholesalers, shop managers, state bureaucrats or anyone else between producers and consumers who once took a share of profits and added to the costs of goods. Mr. Tso-lakidis’s group runs a website where orders are placed in advance and then distributed at markets to cus-tomers for a fixed price paid in cash.

His group takes a small cut to cover expenses, but it does not pay salaries to its members, more than 3,500 volunteers who have jobs or are unemployed. It is a small link in a chain of ventures out to create a parallel “social” economy, starting with what became known as the “po-tato revolution,” a now nationwide movement that has slashed the price of potatoes by getting farmers to sell directly to customers.

Christos Kalaitzis, 53, a convert to the cause who grows kiwis, ol-ives and chickpeas with his wife on their farm near Mount Olympus, acknowledged that he, too, had ini-tially been skeptical but had gotten so fed up with not being paid by big wholesalers and exporters that went bust after taking his products that he had taken the chance.

“The goal is not to destroy the old market system but just to slow it down and get it to change,” Mr. Ka-laitzis explained. “ If the free market in Greece worked properly, none of this would be necessary.”

Fiori Zafeiropoulou, an expert on ways to mix social goals and business initiatives, advised officials drafting a new law that gives legal status to “social cooperative enterprises,” entities that combine both business interests and social benefits.

“This is a whole new concept for Greece,” she said.

Progress, she said, has often been slow because “in Greece there is a problem, and the problem is called corruption.” She said the culture re-volves around getting favors from the state, as well as demanding bribes and kickbacks.

Mr. Mavromatis, the detergent maker, said the purchasing manag-ers at supermarkets all demanded bribes just to agree to a meeting so he could present his products. They also asked for money to ensure good display for his goods, he said.

He said that when he started selling through the no-middlemen group, “I had been dealing with su-permarkets for so long I kept wait-ing for them to ask for money under the table. But nobody ever asked, and I have not paid anything.”

Today Mr. Mavromatis is a regu-lar at the no-middlemen markets. While he said he got a slightly lower price than before, he no longer has to worry about paying bribes or getting checks that bounce. Struggling fami-lies, meanwhile, get to buy goods at a fraction of the normal market price.

Flush with cash for the first time since Greece’s economy went into a nose dive in 2008, Mr. Mavromatis recently bought a new truck to trans-port his detergents from his factory and has expanded his product line to include toilet paper. Even after six straight years of recession, he said, “people need to wash clothes, do their dishes and go to the bathroom.”